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TRS-80 in Sweden

carlsson

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Jul 30, 2003
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Västerås, Sweden
I digged up a retrospective magazine about personal computing in Sweden, and it contains a rather lengthy article about the TRS-80 line of computers. As mentioned before, when I researched my old home computer magazines for price information, only twice did I see any advertisment or other mention of TRS-80 and that was the CoCo in 1983.

It turns out that already in 1978, a sales company in Gothenburg called Ekman & C: o had the TRS-80 agenture, but they never bothered to market the computer. They thought it was a computer for hobbyists, and that a lot of software development would be required to sell it on the Swedish market.

In 1980, some other companies (Facit, Gylling etc) tried to take over the agenture. In the end, the Johnson Group got the deal, and started a daughter company called Nordisk Mikrosystem AB. They focused on the TRS-80 Model II (launched in May 1979) and also decided to develop their own software. However, they underestimated how much work it would be, and the launch was much delayed. Since the TRS-80 natively has a proprietary operating system, all software had to be written exclusively for it. After a while, they cancelled the idea to develop own software and instead decided to sell the computer with CP/M, for which there already were external software companies.

They still had trouble to obtain software, and the TRS-80 sales never were successful. There already were other competitors in the business computing (PET, Apple, the Swedish ABC computers etc - it must have been somewhere at this time IBM PC was launched too).

At the new year 1981/82, the daughter company was transferred to another company in the Johnson group, and focus shifted to sell the Altos computer instead. By spring 1982, fewer and fewer TRS-80 were sold. In August, there were rumours that Nordisk Mikrosystem and the agenture was up for sale. By then, the programmers had left the project.

I should check again which company had the agenture in August 1983 when the CoCo was advertised. As you can see, even claiming it was the most sold computer in the US (like they did) would not make it easier to sell here if years of business had been thrown away. Most other agentures had tried hard to establish themselves in the late 70'ties. Some did better than others (i.e. Datatronic - Commodore).
 
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